The European Commission recently released a first roadmap that already indicates what could be the relative contributions of the different sectors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 to 95% below 1990 levels by 2050, which is setting the scene for new EU level policy actions. A second roadmap should be released by the DG Energy 2050 later this year, 2011. Different stakeholders have already presented their vision of the path towards 2050 and different strategies to make it happen are emerging at member state level, which bring new risks for policy fragmentation, but also opens new opportunities for cooperation among member states and for European added value. We provide a rationale for ten priority EU-interventions to add European value to member states’ first steps on the road towards 2050. We distinguish three different types of EU involvement to 2050, i.e. “effort sharing”, “harmonization”, and “level playing field”.